The Spirit of Laws: Translated from the French of M. de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. By Thomas Nugent, ...

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J. Nourse, and P. Vaillant, 1773

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Page 222 - When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.
Page 222 - Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control ; for the judge would then be the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.
Page 231 - ... have the means of examining in what manner its laws have been executed; an advantage which this government has over that of Crete and Sparta, where the cosmi and the ephori gave no account of their administration.
Page 352 - These creatures are all over black, and with such a flat nose that they can scarcely be pitied. It is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise Being, should place a soul, especially a good soul, in such a black ugly body.
Page 220 - We must have continually present to our minds the difference between independence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would be no longer possessed of liberty, because all his fellow-citizens would have the same power.
Page 232 - The great are always obnoxious to popular envy; and were they to be judged by the people, they might be in danger from their judges, and would, moreover, be deprived of the privilege which the meanest subject is possessed of in a free state, of being tried by his peers.
Page 3 - ... physical world. This is because, on the one hand, particular intelligent beings are of a finite nature, and consequently liable to error ; and on the other, their nature requires them to be free agents. Hence they do not steadily conform to their primitive laws ; and even those of their own instituting they frequently infringe. Whether brutes be governed by the general laws of motion, or by a particular movement, we cannot determine.
Page 443 - Hence it follows that when these manners and customs are to be changed, it ought not to be done by laws; this would have too much the air of tyranny: it would be better to change them by introducing other manners and other customs.
Page 7 - That different nations ought, in time of peace, to do one another all the good they can, and, in time of war, as little harm as possible, without prejudice to their own real interests.
Page 223 - They may plunder the state by their general determinations ; and as they have likewise the judiciary power in their hands, every private citizen may be ruined by their particular decisions. The whole power is here united in one body ; and though there is no external pomp that indicates a despotic sway, yet the people feel the effects of it every moment.

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